We'll Soon Be Able to Create Human Hearts With 3-D Printing

We'll Soon Be Able to Create Human Hearts With 3-D Printing

Cardiovascular scientists predict it will possible to use 3D printers to make a whole heart from the recipients' own cells within a decade.

Stuart K Williams Williams- executive and scientific director of the Cardiovascular Innovation Institute at the University of Louisville- says he and his team of more than 20 have already bioengineered a coronary artery and printed the smallest blood vessels in the heart used in microcirculation. "These studies have reached the advanced preclinical stage showing printed blood vessels will reconnect with the recipient tissue creating new blood flow in the printed tissue."

The team has also worked on other methods of bioengineering tissue, including electrospinning for the creation of large blood vessel scaffolds that can then be joined with bioprinted microvessels.

But why print the parts, when you can print the whole in one go? We shouldn't just be able to repair the heart using bioengineering, but replace it.

Giving a simplified breakdown of the process, he explains: "a patient enters the operating room and tissue is removed (we think fat is the best source) and regenerative cells isolated. The cells are then mixed with solutions that contain extracellular matrix molecules and other factors and placed in the bioprinter. The bioprinter then prints the heart."

Bioengineers have already 3D printed a tiny functioning liver, but the problem is keeping it alive. The liver, for instance, was just a millimetre thick and four millimetres wide, and survived only five days.

The key to Williams' heart surviving could be in encouraging the natural self-organising of cells in that heart, that drives a process called inosculation he describes as the "knitting together" of cells. It's how surgeons explain the connection made between skin grafts and tissue. "The bioprinted vessels [will] inosculate with the recipient blood vessels, and blood flows into the printed vessels," says Williams. This is how those various parts of the whole will stitch together, with microvessels connecting the parts of the whole to get the nutrients where they need to be.

"There is great interest and support [because] everyone understands this technology will lead to ancillary discoveries and new therapies to treat just part of the heart or part of the circulatory system." Of course, he admits, the early versions will be expensive -- something flagged up by skeptics of the technology. But that's the same for any groundbreaking technology.

Read more:
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-11/21/3d-printed-whole-heart
Image via Scientific Illustrator